roughbarked wrote:Results look promising. Can you tell me about these macro rails?

The macro focus rails mount onto the tripod and the camera mounts onto the rails. The rails allow you to move the camera left/right and forward/back with very fine control to focus the macro lens.

You can also use rails to do focus stacking. Depth of field can be very small using a macro lens and it can be difficult to get all of your subject into focus at once. You take multiple shots and move the camera slightly between each, bringing a new plane into focus for each shot. Then special focus stacking software combines the focussed areas of each image to produce a picture with a much greater depth of field. The photo of the St Andrews Cross spider from yesterday is a set of 4 such shots. I used CombineZP to do the stacking.

After I charged my battery last week I got sick which wasn't fun... hahaha... no truly, it wasn't.

I am 'better' now so went outside and took five shots of a moth and an ant which really did not co-operate. I have also forgotten how to drive my camera but tried to savage something. Here is a cropped image of the last shot I took:

It goes well but the photographer struggles :) It generally represents different challenges. Increasing the magnification decreases the distance of the subject from the end of the lens, it decreases the available light and makes it harder to focus. The lens is manual focus only.

Bringing the subject closer to the lens makes it harder to position the camera, flash and subject. Often other stuff gets in the way since I mostly shoot active critters where they happen to be. It is harder to focus with less light and you have to frame your subject better. At five times magnification there isn't usually much you want to crop away. Also there are different challenges trying to illuminate the background, black backgrounds are less interesting.

Increasing mag. increases shake too.

I usually use the technique - and same with the 100mm macro - of taking pictures at minumum mag and get closer as the critter allows. There are other ways to do it but generally most of my shots go this way so that I end up with a sequence of increased magnification.

The weave of the chair I am sitting on at 1x

Same chair 5x

Spent nearly no time on the shots but had the same problems listed above.

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